Party tricks are second nature to Chanel Tapper, who has long wielded the Guinness World Records title for woman with the globe’s longest tongue.
The California native can easily use the 3.8in (9.75cm) organ to remove Jenga blocks from a stack. She can flip red plastic cups with it; touch the tip of her nose as well as under her chin; and raise a spoon by curling it around the utensil.
But nothing quite beats showing her tongue to people and watching them shriek in terror as they realize it is longer than a medium-sized lightbulb – or a credit card.
“Honestly, the best reaction I could ever get when someone sees my tongue is screaming,” Tapper, 34, said recently in an interview published on the Guinness World Records website. “People yell or scream in shock, or horror sometimes, [and] that’s probably my favorite because it’s funny to me because it’s a dramatic response.”
Tapper’s comments to the organization whose database of 40,000 records is a constant source of public fascination came about two decades after acquaintances first clued her into her uniquely prodigious tongue.
She once recounted how she was about 11 when she got into the habit of teasing people around her by sticking her tongue out, and the common reaction was for them to comment on its length. Then, about a couple of years later, she achieved early internet virality after YouTube users spotted her sticking her tongue out on a video and became transfixed by its elongation.
Guinness World Records finally invited her to an event in Los Angeles in 2010 to measure her tongue and see if she merited a spot in the organization’s database. She closely beat two other competitors for the distinction, surpassing the average tongue length for women by about 1.9cm (roughly three-fourths of an inch) – and for men by some 1.2cm (a half-inch or so).
Tapper’s record still stood as of her 31 March interview with Guinness. Even though more than one online commenter has compared her to the slimy-tongued, fictional Marvel Comics villain Venom, she said she held the mark dearly.
“I like little fun, silly things like that,” Tapper said.
Furthermore, the recognition had given her the chance to travel internationally.
One such trip involved visiting the fashion capital Milan and being photographed with her tongue painted blue and green in photos for the Welcome Successful Living campaign from the Italian brand Diesel. Other Guinness World Record holders participated in the campaign, too.
“It’s fun – I get to see the parts of the world I’ve never seen before,” Tapper said.
